Dish Media’s Liam Kristinnsson on how linear and programmatic TV are converging

As Dish Media’s new head of programmatic partnerships, Kristinnsson is helping turn advanced TV into a single, addressable marketplace. Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.Damian Fowler (00:00):I'm Damian Fowler.Ilyse Liffreing (00:01):And I'm Ilyse Liffreing.Damian Fowler (00:02):And welcome to this edition of The Big Impression.Ilyse Liffreing (00:09):Today, we're joined by Liam Kristinnsson, head of programmatic partnerships at Dish Media, where he's helping shape how the company connects advertisers with premium audiences across both linear and digital environments.Damian Fowler (00:23):Dish has been pushing hard into the programmatic space. From Dish Connected, it's addressable solution across the ecosystem to Advantage, which links programmatic buying with linear inventory in real time. It's all part of a broader move to bring automation and accountability to advanced TV.Ilyse Liffreing (00:39):We'll talk with Liam about how Dish is tackling fragmentation, what premium really means in a mixed green world, and where the next phase of programmatic growth is headed.Damian Fowler (00:51):So let's get into it.Liam Kristinnsson (00:57):Dish Connected has really revolutionized our product in the marketplace. We've been able to convert an additional four million to five million households into tangible CTV devices across real-time bidding systems across the industry. And it's kind of given us a leg up against some of our more linear competition where we now have full autonomy over our inventory and can enable and provide transparency downstream to any client.Damian Fowler (01:28):That's amazing. I mean, there was a moment there where there was a sort of either all linear or CTV, but this is something that's kind of connecting thoseLiam Kristinnsson (01:38):Two worlds. I think this is the start of the convergence. I know it probably truly started post-pandemic, I would say, but the reality is now that what is perceived as underutilized impression-based audiences are now becoming tangible and kind of overlapping with their traditional legacy linear purchases. And there's much more value to it because we are not enabling people to find attribution in a more roundabout extrapolated way, but we can provide meaningful real time results to third party attribution vendors or measurement vendors.Damian Fowler (02:20):And that brings us to Advantage, which you introduced in May to Power Programmatic and Linear at the same time. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?Liam Kristinnsson (02:30):Yeah. So the beauty of Advantage is it really expands upon what we've already built for Programmatic in Disconnected, but it provides solutions across the whole suite of products we have. Our addressable business can tap into real-time kind of innovations, real-time optimizations against audiences, ensure that we are better delivering across the target audience and finding that incremental reach that in the past may have been next to impossible to verify. And now we have all that inventory in one place. It's kind of like a grocery store when I think the industry has become accustomed to going to a bodega. That's very New York with me, I understand. I like that. But sometimes bodegas have eggs, they have a deli, they might have milk, but they might not always have milk and seltzer and all the little things that you want on a day-to-day basis. And the reality is something lacking when it comes to you being able to actually fill your fridge.(03:35):Now we have all those components that the customer or the client is looking for.Damian Fowler (03:40):Yeah. I like that analogy.Ilyse Liffreing (03:41):It's a good one. Yeah, no, I like that. And now Liam, I'm curious about the advertisers you're working with. Is there a new segment of buyers that Programmatic is really opening the door to here? What is basically your sense of that cohort?Liam Kristinnsson (03:58):Yeah, I think it really has grown overnight programmatic in general, but I think it allows us to have expanded exposure across all clients that are looking for that more meaningful kind of results. I think we are seeing a lot of success in generating a lot of traction across the CPG world, the direct to consumer world. And I think we're finding a nice overlap from a category perspective of what we traditionally looked at as direct IO or addressable business, but maybe not all those brands or clients in maybe like a pharmaceutical vertical would tap or earmark dollars for commitments early in their planning phase. Now they have the liberty and the luxury to find that right audience and enable dollars downstream where we're just not hunting in that lane and now we can kind of, instead of spreading ourselves thin, the technology can enable us to really kind of tap into all those brands, whether it be the CPG or the pharmaceuticals.(05:05):Now on the CPG side, I would double down further. I ...